Dispatch: Caught between Isil militants and the US-led air strikes,
many Iraqi civilians have nowhere to go

Dodging coalition bombs from the skies and fleeing wrathful jihadists on the ground, the Iraqis in whose name war is being fought have nowhere to go.

As British Tornadoes join the air raids against Islamic State militants who control their cities, the escape routes are becoming ever fewer for ordinary civilians.

They criss-cross the country, seeking their family and refuge. The spot where Nadam Abbas Aliwali, fleeing his home in Mosul, had come to rest had the air of a last stand for the hundreds already stuck there, many now camping in the open.

"I am running away from Isil's killing and the aircraft's bombs," he said, speaking just outside the city of Kirkuk.

As with many Sunni Arabs from Mosul, he had initially welcomed in the Islamic State militants, hoping they would be better than the corrupt and often brutal Iraqi army.

Now, he was seeking to run away for good with his wife and five children, only for the family to be denied entrance to the neighbouring safe haven of Iraqi Kurdistan on account of their ethnicity. The Kurdish authorities are afraid of Arab arrivals, fearing them as potential Islamic State fifth-columnists.

The roadside where Mr Aliwali had parked his car was already home to growing crowd of fleeing Iraqis - men, women and children, pensioners, even a couple of Iraqi policemen, sleeping rough.

"I cannot go back to Fallujah," said one woman, Umm Shaimah, 43, who was camping in the lee of a brieze block wall with her sister Umm Ali, their mother, nieces and nephews.

Her house, now under Islamic State control, was destroyed by an Iraqi government helicopter's barrel bomb. After that, the sisters tried going to Saddam Hussein' s home town of Tikrit, until Isil came there in June. Then they went back north to Kirkuk, where they gathered up their mother.

But life in multi-ethnic Kirkuk is also breaking down as the Kurds who control the town come to distrust and harass the Arabs among them. On Friday they tried Erbil, and were turned back, and so spent the night here.

Their neighbour under the shade of the brieze-block wall was Umm Othman al-Jabouri, who nestled her two six-year-old grand-daughters, Aiya and Nasreen, in the folds of her black abaya.

Mrs Jabouri lost her husband to an Allied bombing raid in her Islamic State-controlled town, Saadiya, a month ago. Knowing they were next to a militant-controlled base, they ran for their lives when they heard the jets come, but her husband insisted on finishing his prayers and died when the bombs missed the base and hit the house.

Aiya's father, Mrs Jabouri's son-in-law, was killed by the other side.

A policeman, Walid Khalid Hassan, was kidnapped by the jihadists and never seen again. His body was never found but, every now and then, the kidnap gangs leave boxes of heads by the road-side. His was found in one such box.

When Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant swept across north-west Iraq in June, many Sunni Arab residents welcomed them, hoping for an end to what they called Iraq's Shia dictatorship. Some Sunni tribal sheikhs and old followers of Saddam Hussein also backed the Islamic State, saying it was a temporary alliance with a minor foe whom they could easily oust when necessary.

That time is long past. "We thought we had been freed when Isil came," Mr Aliwali said. "But we found that Isil were even worse."

In Mosul, so far, Isil has avoided the mass beheadings and crucifixions seen in Raqqa, the Syrian city which is the group's de facto capital. But residents have been stoned to death for adultery, and critics gunned down on the street.

Smoking has been banned, and women are forced to wear niqab, a face-veil, when venturing out. Non-Sunnis - Shia, Christians, non-Arab minorities - have fled, but even for the Sunnis there are humiliations, echoes of what went before.

Businesses have been taken over, homes seized for the jihadists, who have dispersed themselves among the population for protection. Prices have soared.

That is the threat from the ground: from the air come the Allied bombs. Mr Aliwali was on the roof of his house ten days ago when he saw the missiles fall on a large neighbouring pad with a swimming pool, built by a Mosul multi-millionaire, which had been taken over by the jihadists.

"An hour before they had been swimming in the pool," he said. "Then I saw the bombs land, with my own eyes. My own house was shaking."

Some bombs miss. He said three civilian families - ten people - had been killed four days ago when a bomb struck their homes, near a local hospital. He estimated that hundreds of civilians had died in the raids so far.

Many Islamic State fighters had also died, he said. When French jets hit a base between Mosul and the town of Zummar, he had been in Jumhuriya Hospital visiting his brother, who was in for a routine operation. He saw more than a hundred dead Islamic State fighters being brought in, and hundreds more injured ones, including British and French, he said.

There are not only Iraqis on both sides of this civil war, but French and now British too.

Given all this, it is hard to see how Britain's six tornadoes will bring peace to Mosul, or the ordinary lives these people say they want to lead.

Few of the Iraqis waiting outside Kirkuk supported the Allied air strikes. "It's useless," said Abu Alaa, 54, another Sunni Arab, who was trying to get back to his job in a town that has changed hands twice between Kurds and Isil.

He wanted a political solution, led by Iraqi ground troops - not American. He wanted those ground troops, when they came to be a strong, impartial force, without sectarian tendencies.

But then everyone wants that, or so they say. If Iraq had proved capable of it, Abu Alaa, Umm Shaimah and the others would not now be camping by the roadside.